Film review: The Other Woman

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Published:21:00Tuesday 29 April 2014

Revenge is a dish best serve ice-cold and in generous portions in Nick Cassavetes’s romantic comedy of spiteful sisterly solidarity.

For the first hour, it’s a tasty dish laced with tart one-liners by screenwriter Melissa Stack, who deftly sketches the emotional bonds between a wife and the two other women, who have unknowingly slept with her skirt-chasing husband.

Undated Film Still Handout from The Other Woman. Pictured: Cameron Diaz, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. See PA Feature FILM Fillm Reviews. Picture credit should read: PA Photo/Fox UK Film. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature FILM Film Reviews.

These early scenes, in which the embittered spouse surfs a tidal wave of rage while the two mistresses wrestle with their guilt, achieve a blend of painful home truths and ribald humour.

“You had sex with my husband 50 times?!” shrieks the wife when she learns about the impressively gymnastic nature of her husband’s relationship with one of his bits on the side. “Don’t you have a job? Or hobbies?!” she caterwauls.

Once the feisty femmes agree on a plan of attack to make the cheating husband pay for his bed-hopping sins, any subtlety in the script is supplanted by crude toilet humour and cutesy fairy-tale romances.

Thus one mistress drops laxatives into the husband’s drinks and we’re treated to a protracted sequence in a cramped toilet cubicle with the philanderer as he endures a blitzkrieg of deafening rectal explosions.

He deserves his comeuppance, we just don’t need to see or hear it in such detail.